The Life and Death of Miami Coral

Last summer, a colony of Colpophyllia natans, a species of brain coral living near Diddy’s dock on Star Island, a pill-shaped marvel of dredge engineering just west of South Beach Miami, was subjected to Drake’s single “Started from the Bottom” at extreme volumes. Colin Foord, a marine biologist and coral researcher, was out for a midnight snorkel and reported that the bass vibrations from Diddy’s mansion, while considerable, had little effect on the coral. “Marine life has habituated to the regularity of low frequency,” Foord, who is thirty-two years old, told me. “But I felt it in my skull.”

I accompanied Foord to Star Island last year, while researching a book on Miami bass. I had been wondering whether corals might be interested in colonizing a blown subwoofer on the ocean floor. Could an eighteen-inch bass membrane serve as an artificial reef? “It would corrode,” Foord told me.

For the past hundred thousand years, corals have been constructing their own kingdoms in the Miami area, while helping to sustain the lives of thousands of aquatic species. The abundance of man-made detritus in the Biscayne Bay has given corals the opportunity to recycle our trash as substratum. Greco-Roman statues, Santeria cauldrons, and grocery carts all offer a permanent sustainable living situation for invertebrates. (Having clung around for nearly half a billion years without an immune system, corals have proven themselves to be resilient adapters. There’s an argument to be made that corals, who build reefs on top of the repurposed fossils of their own dead, are Miami’s first true revival architects.)

The water around Star Island has recently taken on cloudy swamp tones. From the southeastern curve—near the dock of a wealthy plastic surgeon known as Dr. Boob God—you can see currents delivering particulate murk from the Port of Miami. Since November of 2013, the Army Corps of Engineers’ Deep Dredge project, an effort to widen and deepen shipping lanes, has been gouging Government Cut, the shipping channel that accesses Port of Miami. Government Cut also bisects two reef tracts.

“Government Cut is critical in allowing corals to flourish inside the city limits of Miami,” Foord told me. “The depth flushes Biscayne Bay with clean seawater from the Gulf Stream every incoming tide, allowing the corals to exist on man-made seawalls in downtown Miami where they previously could not survive.” Biologists like Foord are worried that the sediment kicked up by the Deep Dredge project is smothering staghorn and other corals living in the region. Corals exhibit stress when they are denied sunlight and expel algae, a primary energy source that normally carries out photosynthesis. Without algae, a coral will bleach and die.

Between the sediment blizzard caused by the Deep Dredge project and the possibility of future underwater blasting by contractors hired by the Army Corps of Engineers, many environmentalists believe that the brain coral faces annihilation by the federal government. In an effort to minimize casualties, the Army Corps relocated threatened corals to an artificial mitigation reef, built two miles offshore of Miami Beach. The Corps has been monitoring sediment levels, but a recent survey determined that at least two hundred more colonies of endangered staghorn corals are living in the dredge area than previously believed. Conservation groups like the Biscayne Bay Waterkeeper argue that this finding alone should have driven the Army Corps to seek a new biological opinion assessment by the National Marine Fisheries Service, rather than following a 2011 opinion that estimated a lower colony count. The Waterkeeper is calling for the removal of all protected colonies, while fearing that the corals won’t survive the proposed two years of dredging. (The Waterkeeper is in the process of suing the Army Corps for violations of the Endangered Species Act that have allegedly occurred during the dredging so far.)

In late May, Coral Morphologic, a lab founded by Foord, his childhood friend Jared McKay, and a group of researchers from the University of Miami, was granted collection permits to transplant smaller corals left behind in the dredge zone. Starting on May 26th, they had twelve days to complete the task, under treacherous conditions. According to Foord, visibility was “chocolate milkshake, at best.” (As a diver, his coral risk assessment included the possibility of getting sucked into the propeller of a casino cruise ship named Bimini SuperFast.) Nonetheless, Memorial Day found Foord working underwater in the shadows of cargo ships chugging overhead, scaling a forty-foot wall to carefully extract a ten-pound brain coral with a sledgehammer, while keeping an eye out for an unoccupied crevice to hang on to, lest the outgoing Gulf Stream current sweep him away to the Bermuda Triangle.

During the allotted twelve days, Foord and his team collected over six hundred and fifty corals from thirty different species. Some of the rescued specimens were taken to the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science for study. Others were safely transplanted to the Army Corps mitigation reef. The rest were brought back to Coral Morphologic’s lab in Overtown, a vaulted limestone space formerly inhabited by a Pentecostal church known as the Ministry of Love, Power and Grace.

Started in 2007, Coral Morphologic has served as a coral film studio to help support research through various grant-funded endeavors. Since coral offspring can reproduce through asexual fragmentation, the lab can also serve as a cloning facility. Clients have included M.I.T., cancer researchers, plumbers, and the guy who produced Lil Wayne’s “The Carter III.” Walk-ins are not accepted.

With the Deep Dredge project underway, the lab has also doubled as a rehab hospital. Transporting coral is a delicate process—species must be separated or they’ll wage turf war with stinging tentacles. Keeping coral alive is an enormously difficult task, so until recently it has typically been studied postmortem. (I spoke with a reformed coral smuggler who operated out of the Florida Keys in the early nineteen-seventies, flying brain corals up to congressmen in Washington. He grew depressed when the corals kept dying, and now sells used telescopes and tube amps.)

Upon arrival at the Morphologic lab, corals undergo a rigorous housecleaning process involving bone saws and tweezers. Crabs, sponges, and other unwanted hitchhikers are evicted. My arrival at Coral Morphologic was less eventful. I was met by a canal stench and an intern unloading a jumbo Ziploc of his grandmother’s homemade biscuits from the trunk of his car.

The Diploria labyrinthformis that Foord saved from Government Cut was kept for observation in its own tank, incandescent in Tron blue. A fluorescent bulb tracked slowly back and forth over a two-hundred-gallon tub; in the light, the corallimorph resembled a handful of Skittles, and the radial flower anemones looked like a mandala seen through a child’s kaleidoscope.

Foord has recently noticed that corals seem to prefer sunken grocery carts. “Shopping carts act as micro-wrecks, he said. “They provide a great substrate for corals and sponges while offering protection for smaller fish. I’m not advocating for more shopping carts to be dumped in the Biscayne Bay, but it does beg the question whether they are trash or part of the ecosystem.” Foord believes the shopping carts can be attributed to Miami’s large population of homeless people, who use public parks along the Bay as camping spots—another man-made contribution to coral proliferation in the area.

Last April, I joined Foord and McKay in a boat out to Government Cut, passing abandoned shopping carts in Lummus Park along the way. Puttering out towards the MacArthur Causeway, the FEC slip appeared on our left, the site of David Beckham’s proposed Major League Soccer stadium. Construction would require filling in the slip, which for the past eight years has harbored a man-made coral habitat despite the runoff from city storm drains into the Biscayne Bay. (Foord half-jokingly but not inaccurately calls it “Feces Slip.”) It’s by far the nastiest place Foord has ever gone diving—all so he could challenge Beckham to create an artificial reef elsewhere. He filmed evidence of coral living as close to Biscayne Boulevard as possible. (The stadium proposal did not pass.)

Leaving the FEC slip in our wake—and reopening our nostrils—we headed over to the outer reef where the salvaged corals would be transplanted. Talk then turned to blasting, a phase of Deep Dredge slated to begin, in October, if the limestone resists the dredging. Confined underwater blasting, a technique used to reduce ecological harm, would dismantle the harder sedimentary bed for the hydraulic cutterhead dredge—a machine that looks, according to Terri Sellers, a marine biologist working for the Army Corps of Engineers, “like an giant egg beater with teeth.” When Sellers began working for the Army Corps, she raised concerns about the environmental effects of underwater blasting, fearing that her employers might be blowing up dolphins she’d once studied, and protected, herself. The Army Corps enrolled Sellers in a mandatory “blasting school,” making her one of the few marine biologists certified in “basic blast design.”

The standard of protection for marine life in blast zones is based on the standard explosion survival radius used by Navy Seals. Coral are believed to be able to survive an underground explosion within a closer radius than, say, manatees. “Endangered-species observers and blasting engineers are in constant conversation,” Sellers said. “It’s a blast-by-blast assessment.”

As part of the Art Basel show in Miami, in 2010, Coral Morphologic beamed images of giant corals onto an office building in South Beach. Titled “Artificial Reef,” the video installation, according to Foord, “is built around the premise that most of Miami’s infrastructure is comprised of fossilized coral-reef limestone.” The project also envisioned the coral as a new icon for twenty-first century Miami, a city threatened by rising sea levels. (In an odd coincidence, a headline in the Guardian warned, “Miami, the great world city, is drowning” on the same day that LeBron James announced that he was leaving for higher ground in Cleveland.) Corals are far more sensitive to climate change than humans, and their fate could be read as a grim foreshadowing of Miami’s future: a once-thriving biome transformed into an aquatic morgue. Foord himself plans to have his cremated remains mixed with coral limestone and converted into an artificial reef—a way to join the substratum while continuing to support coral growth. “Just grow some coral on me,” he said. “My epitaph: ‘So long, and thanks for all the fish.’ ”